Oct 08, 2019 - Sale 2518

Sale 2518 - Lot 4

Price Realized: $ 2,375
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
ALBERT ALEXANDER SMITH (1896 - 1940)
Temptation

Lithograph, 1930. 185x260 mm; 7 1/4x10 1/4 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 26/100 in pencil, lower margin.

A very scarce lithograph by Albert Alexander Smith, a talented jazz musician and artist, who moved to Paris in 1920 after graduating from the National Academy of Design in New York. Despite his technical skill, Smith would occasionally create such scenes with racial stereotypes for a white American and European audience. Smith also made a series of portrait etchings of great black leaders, probably at the request of his patron Arthur Schomburg. His artwork was also featured on the covers of the periodicals Crisis and Opportunity. Smith is one of the few known African-American printmakers known working in the early 1920s. Other impressions of this print are in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Library of Congress. Theresa Leininger-Miller pp. 232-34.